Should the UN recognize a Palestinian State?

How about a quid pro quo? How about requiring that the Palestinians and the other neighbors of Israel recognize Israel as a Jewish state? That is, until the Arab world recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, what is really being proposed is a "one state" solution...

Springtime for Cairo

A little ditty to commemorate the pogrom in Cairo, September 9, 2011:
Tune: Springtime for Hitler

The Arab Spring was having trouble, what a sad sad story
Needed some old scapegoats to bring it back to glory
Where, O where were they? And how to make them pay?
We looked around and then we found
The powers we must slay.
And now its ...

Springtime for Cairo and Tripoli,
Tunis is happy and gay
We know now just how we cannot lose
Go out, and burn out those dirty Jews!

Springtime for Cairo and Tripoli,
Winter for Jews and the West
Springtime for Cairo and Tripoli
Come on, Arabs, and give it your best

I was born in old Aswan, my hate for Jews goes on and on
Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Hamas party

Springtime for Cairo and Tripoli
Burn the embassy of Israel today
Tanks rolling on the sands again
Egypt is in good hands again

Springtime for Cairo and Tripoli
Jew-hate is flaring once more
Springtime for Cairo and Tripoli
Means that soon we'll be going
We've got to be going
You know we'll be going to war!

If this offends anyone, all I can say is, "Es tut mir Leid," which is German for, "I'm sorry." I don't mean to criticize Arabs generally. I do mean to recommend that the Arab Spring achieve freedom and dignity for Arabs (both Muslims and non-Muslims) without diminishing the freedom and dignity of anyone else.

Ten Years After

Ten years ago today I got a phone call from my niece. "Turn on your television!" she shouted. "Somebody flew jet planes into the World Trade Center!" I did as she said. The networks showed replays of the second plane impact. It looked like terrorism to me, and it looked like they had engineering help.

At that time, I was involved in scientific and engineering support of efforts to counter the spread and mitigate the consequences of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). If the terrorists had used WMD, my group might have been called. It was a relatively small step from what I had been doing to scientific and technological support of homeland security and counter-terrorism.

"I have to go to work," I said.

What else I thought that day and the day after, is in this blog.

Today, I just want to make a case for the superiority of the Western Way of Justice to that of Jihadi-Takfiris (aka Islamo-Fascist terrorists and their sympathizers) who think that it is justice to kill any Westerners in any numbers that they can, for whatever set of grievances on which they fixate on any given day. If we Westerners believed in a theory of justice like theirs, there wouldn't be any Muslims in the West. Our way is superior - case closed.

And it is therefore case closed that our way must prevail. We need to find a way to fight the war of the Civilized World against the Jihadi-Takfiris (or Islamo-Fascists) less expensively, so we can stay in it for as long as it takes. Decades, perhaps generations. Until all the world's people, especially women, are free to act, speak, and dress as they choose, until all the world's governments are answerable to their people, and until all the world accepts that it is just to punish people only for crimes that they themselves have actually committed.

I'm still at work, even though I've changed fields again. And I intend to keep on working on it, even after I officially retire.

When will the War be Over?

While cleaning up my files, I came across this reply to a friend, who wanted to know when I thought the war in Iraq would end.

To me, Iraq is not a war - it is a battlefront in a larger war: The War of Facism-with-an-Islamic-face against Liberal Democracy. It is indeed a world war, which started with the Iranian Revolution and finally caught our attention with the 9/11 attacks.

It is true that the US chose to initiate Iraq as a battlefront, and also true that it was a bad idea to do so (as we can all see in retrospect). But even if we pull out of Iraq, the war will go on against us.

We keep thinking of war in terms of our own culture - jump into a war, fight it full time, get it over with and then get back to normal. Our way of war decends from ancient Greece, in which the soldier-citizens were farmers, and had to get the war over with in time to get back to their fields to avoid starvation.

The horse-riding nomads of the Eurasian steppe thought of war differently. For them, war was something you did part time. You could spend part of any day fighting, and the rest of the time you grazed your horses. There was no "getting it over with," because if there was no more war, then there was no more honor to be won. The Islamofacist style of war descends from that of the horse peoples of the steppe - you work at your job, spend time with your family, and help place a bomb when you have a spare evening.

In other words, there is no Greco-Western ending to this conflict. This is just a phase of Globalization. The Islamofacists fear that their women will become liberated by the influx of Western values, and are fighting it with everything they've got. Ergo, the war will be over when women everywhere actually become liberated. There will be no surrender, just nothing to fight over anymore.

Women are the key to victory. Weapons can at best perform holding actions.

...

I think we all need to take a more global and more long term perspective, before precipitously acting - either to fight more or to fight less. We need to choose our battles more carefully, and fight them less intensively - with more emphasis on social relations than on firefights.

On the day of the 9/11 attacks, one of my neighbors and I put up the Stars and Stripes in front of our houses, and agreed to keep displaying it until the war was over. I guess I'll be keeping it there for a while yet.

Bin Laden is Dead

President of the United States Barack Obama has announced that Usama Bin Laden has been killed in a US raid on a compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan. I'm glad, but I'm not overjoyed. If I could have had my way, Bin Laden would have spent decades imprisoned in the basement of a building in Langley, VA, with only the disembodied voice of his interrogator for company. He could then die the natural death that is often slower and harder to bear than a bullet's impact.

Even now, the Obama Administration is seeing to it that Bin Laden's body is handled according to Islamic custom. I think this is far above what he deserves. To be a Muslim means to submit one's will to God's will, to become a willing servant of God. Bin Laden made himself a servant to his own Jihad, and conjured up an idol in his own diseased imagination which he also made to serve his Jihad. He then blasphemed by calling his idol God (Allah in Arabic). As such, Bin Laden had actually left the true path of Islam and become a Jihadi-Takfiri (Warfare-Apostate). He compounded his idolatry, blasphemy, and apostasy by getting others to do acts of outrageous violence, and by seducing others to follow him into his spiritual abyss.

No, I wouldn't give Usama Bin Laden an Islamic burial. I'd feed his body to wild pigs, collect the dung, and flush it into the sewers at the Pentagon, and around site of the former World Trade Center. Then, any converts to his cause who want to worship him could stick their heads in a toilet at either of these locations.

Oh well. There are bigger things going on. Japan has been going through a terrible time following the earthquake/tsunami of March 11 and aftershocks. The Arab peoples are attempting to throw off the chains of their oppressive governments, and are having a pretty grim time of it in some places. Let us pray for them all.

And then, let us thank God that Usama Bin Laden is now to appear in the history books, rather than the news.

Why American politics is such a Battle

It's simple. Politicians, more than the rest of us, use conflict-producing constructions in their speech. For details see The Grammar of Peace.

I would like to all political office holders, candidates, commentators, and journalists learn to use Green Language to express themselves.

Green Language consists of observations, thoughts, feelings, and specific-action wants. It is a way of starting from and sticking to the facts. It is also a way to be here now, instead of living in the "Victim-Persecutor-Rescuer" mode of viewing reality that is the stock-in-trade of politics.

Take a look at these sites. If you can speak more precisely, you can think more precisely, which can help you get to the truth.

Then we can talk more constructively about what to do regarding Libya, Japan, the economy, the budget, etc.

Veteran's Day

To all of you who have served, the living, the wounded, and the dead, thank you for your sacrifice on behalf of the rest of us. And to you returnees, welcome home. Peace be unto you.

Will the Real Islam Please Stand Up

In a previous post (What is Moderate Islam?) I claimed that Islamofascism will eventually be overcome by real Islam. This raises the question of just what is real Islam?

The easy answer, attempted by the Salafists, is  that real Islam was what the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and his Companions (the Salafs, may God be pleased with them) practiced. But even those Salafists who live on the Arabian peninsula are separated from the Salafs by 1400 years of time. Even though there are records from that time (the Qur'an and the Sunnah - deeds - and Hadith - sayings of the Prophet) and a continuous living practice of Islam, not everything from that time can be recorded, and traditions change subtly or not so subtly over time. If they did not, the Salafists would not be calling for a return the Islam of the past.

The Salafists consider the past 1400 years of change to be contrary to the Will of God. But God created Time, and God ordained that the Prophet and his Companions should die after living ordinary lifespans. It is apparently God's Will that these people should be no longer with us, and that traditions should evolve.

Given that, the accident of geography seems insignificant. After 1400 years, why should Arabian Islam be considered superior to the Islam of Malaysia, or Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion? Indeed, the saddling of religion with the baggage of culture has always been an impediment to the adoption of religion. Christianity did not become widespread in China, India, or Japan because Christian missionaries for the most part insisted that converts to Christianity practice European Christianity, with European cultural values. Had they been flexible enough to let Christianity take on the cultural accoutrements of Asia, world history might have been different.

Islam on the other hand, has taken on the styles and interpretations of the cultures in which it has become widespread. There are many Islams, and all of them are authentic, including American Islam.

As Paul Johnson notes in his History of Christianity, American religions may differ on matters of faith, but all agree to minimum standards of public moral behavior. This consensus has become strained as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered lifestyles are accepted into the mainstream, and as premarital sex and abortion have become common. But there is still wide consensus that there should be a consensus. American Muslims participate in and help shape this consensus along side American Christians, Jews, atheists, and all other Americans.

In other words, the battle lines are drawn up around a minimal rule set (an idea taken over by Thomas P. M. Barnett in The Pentagon's New Map). Matters of religion itself are not part of the fight - they are in the realm of persuasion, or dawa, as Muslims call it. Living under the more numerous and stricter rules of a particular religion (e.g., Sharia for Muslims, Halacha for Jews) is voluntary for the members of that religion, and simply does not apply to members of other religions.

It is the willingness to coexist, neither dominating other religions nor being dominated by them, that American Muslims can take to the world. This, it seems to me, is what Imam Faisal Rauf is trying to promulgate, despite his unfortunate choice of location for the finger he wishes to stick in the eye of the Islamofascists.

There is a great deal of talk about peace in Islam. Muslims greet one another with "Peace be with you." American Muslims have an idea of how to make that peace a reality.

Probing the Fence Line

If you want to attack a facility that is protected by a fence festooned with intrusion sensors, the first thing you want to do is to nullify the sensors. You could try to disable them, but that would only give the guards inside warning of your attack. The best thing is to train the guards to ignore the intrusion sensors, at least for long enough to give you time to establish a position of tactical advantage. So, you cut loose some of the tumbleweeds around the fence. You might entice some of the local animals to interact with the fence. Anything to generate a random sequence of false alarms until the guards get tired of checking out each one. Then you can risk a little jiggling as you get inside.

That lesson from a retired U.S. Navy Seal is what I thought of when I learned of the Israeli encounter with the "Freedom Flotilla" sent by Hamas sympathizers to challenge Israel's blockade of Gaza. Send a ship full of food and aid, no contraband, and a few rowdies ready to make trouble. When the Israelis board the ship to inspect it, mob them, beat them with clubs and sticks (some say metal rods). Now clubs, sticks, and rods are not "deadly weapons" in the same way guns are, but you can kill a man by beating him with clubs, rods, and sticks. You can kill a man by beating him with your fists, if he doesn't fight back. Given that they were being beaten by a crowd that vastly outnumbered them, it isn't surprising that the Israeli commandos started shooting their guns. It was that or be killed. One might fault the Israelis for letting themselves get into a situation where they would have to use such deadly force, but it would have taken a lot more ships and commandos to control the situation without such intensity of force.

In any case, the result was a made for television and blogosphere media event. Mean powerful Israelis bullying innocent people trying to help starving Palestinians in Gaza. And a successful probing attack, to be followed by many others, to break Israel's will to continue the blockade. This will then be followed by another season of rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza, once the Palestinians get rockets shipped from (indirectly or otherwise) Iran. Then another round of Israeli soldiers on the ground in the Gaza strip, followed by another blockade.

It would be nice if the cycle could be broken. Heck, it might even help if Israel could hire a Public Relations firm as good as those working for the Palestinians. There is plenty of material for them. To start, note that the term Palestina was coined by the Roman Empire so that it could make a better case for removing the Judeans (Jews) from their land, which previously had been called Judea.

Here is a video telling the other side of the story:

Maritime Martyrs from CJHS on Vimeo.

And there has also been violence on the border between the US and Mexico. A boy threw rocks at a US Border Patrol Agent, who then shot the boy. There is some discussion that the boy might have been acting as a decoy for smugglers, but who knows? In effect it was another successful probing attack on the fence line. But there is also talk on the right in America about making the border with Mexico harder and shallower - by putting up a guarded wall.

I would prefer making the border softer and deeper - by creating a joint US-Mexican governmental authority to manage the transient population of Mexicans who want to enter the US to do temporary or seasonal work. To make sure they are well treated and reasonably paid. And to vet them so as to keep the criminals out.

We may also have to legalize marijuana just to knock the profit out of the business. We will then get a taste of what China went through when Western interests forced it to legalize the opium trade. But it would be a setback for Mexican drug cartels. And both the Mexican and US governments need them to be set back.

Working Girl

Here is Ruby (foreground) with her mother and father, at her breeder's house. Mom (aka "Milk Bar") is nursing Ruby's nine new brothers and sisters, while Ruby and Dad have been hitting the dog show circuit. In the past three weekends, Ruby has taken one third place, two second places, and two firsts. She's back home tonight, resting from her labors. Actually, dogs seem to do a lot of resting, no matter what.

Today is Memorial Day, on which we remember those patriots who have refreshed the well-spring of liberty with their blood. Let us also remember those survivors who left pieces of themselves (physical, emotional, or both) on the battlefield. You don't have to go it alone. To all of you who have returned, thank you for serving, and welcome back.

We now have pictures of both our fathers in WWII Army uniforms. My father was on the American side, my wife's on the German. Let the old wounds heal. The rest of what I have to say is in VCBC's Military Chapel.

Top Ten Anti-Israel Lies

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is hosting these here. They're pretty good, so I thought I'd pass them along.

As Josh Billings used to say, "It ain't ignorance that hurts folks. It's all the things they know that ain't so."

Conspiracies and Wars

Normally, I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but yesterday's stock market gyration is just too tempting. Consider how much money could be made by executing a few thousand buy orders at the bottom of such a rapid plunge and rebound. Could yesterday's 999 point drop in the Dow be the work of a few rogue traders? A self-funded "probing" cyber attack by a government preparing to paralyze the West should the need arise to do so?

It also looks like the recent attempt to car-bomb Times Square is the result of a long-time association between the family of the alleged bomber, Faisal Shahzad, and militant leaders of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. He had become a naturalized US citizen, making him a very desirable target for recruitment by such groups.

On the other hand, back in the 1960's there was a conspiracy by the US government to cover-up certain embarrassing details of the Vietnam War then in progress by abusing the system of classifying information (in ways that are now illegal). Daniel Ellsberg blew the cover by leaking thousands of pages of classified documents (now known as the Pentagon Papers) to the press. Ellsberg was saved from prison by the Nixon Administration's botching of the case against him, while committing crimes of its own ( the Watergate break-in). Still, I was offended by the way Ellsberg described his crimes and his pot-smoking so proudly during a City Arts and Lectures interview on NPR. Civil disobedience is a serious thing. Maybe Ellsberg would be more serious about it if he had served even a tenth of the 115 year sentence for which he was eligible. I suppose I should thank him, because efforts by him and people like him ended the draft just before I would have been forced to decide between going to Vietnam as a soldier or to prison as a draft resister. I never considered Canada. As I said, civil disobedience is a serious thing. Doing it for the right reasons and taking the consequences is patriotic. Evading the consequences is not. Ellsberg talks as if he's forgotten that.

Today I have friends and colleagues whose careers include one or more tours of duty in Vietnam. I now realize that in a way, we won. The time our war effort bought the Pacific Rim economies to develop, and the pain it caused the North Vietnamese, made it impossible for one Asian government after another to fall like dominoes to Communism. So, for those who did what they saw as their duty, thank you for serving and welcome home.

I remember especially one paratrooper who had become a reservist after his tour in Vietnam. He was the only one on campus. I met him while he was in uniform, folding his parachute before his weekend training exercise. He had a lot of guts to try to make it at such a left-leaning school. We all should have been more welcoming to him. After all, he did what he did for us.

State of the Union

I wish to request a small correction to President Obama's State of the Union address. He was mistaken when he said,

Now, even as we prosecute two wars, we're also confronting perhaps the greatest danger to the American people -– the threat of nuclear weapons.

We are not prosecuting two wars. We are fighting in two theaters of operation of one war, the War against Islamofacism. Calling it the "Global War on Terror" was always a bad idea. But not calling it anything at all is worse. This is a war, not a police action. Now it is true that we must find cheaper and more effective ways to fight it than large-scale maneuver warfare employing massive numbers of troops with the attendant massive expenditures. But we (the entire world, not just the US) must fight and win it. For more analysis, click here.

I want to praise the President for this:

But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.

Fantastic. Maybe he will undo the Clinton Administration's decision to defund development of the Integral Fast Reactor.

Finally, I want to state that I think bipartisanship means that major bills should have significant content from both parties, not just a token amendment to buy a vote or two from the opposing side. That would require our representatives from the two parties to trust each other, but so far, they have proven unworthy of each other's trust, which has caused them to lose our trust. Maybe they can start fixing that by showing a little civility to each other.

The War on Whatchamacallit

Right-wing radio and its blogosphere has been all a-twitter about members of the Obama Administration not using the phrase, "War on Terror." Well good for Obama!

Terrorism isn't an enemy. Terrorism is a technique. You can't win a war if you can't even name your enemy. But what do you call it when everything you can think of is Politically Incorrect.

It is certainly not a war against Islam. There are too many Muslims on our side to call it that. Like the ones I saw inside the Pentagon.

Academics get more specific. They call the enemy the "Global Salafist Jihad" or the "Jihadists" for short. But Muslims have positive associations with the Salafs (may Allah be pleased with them) and with jihad. It would be like someone calling the US Military the Freedom Fighters in the names of the Founding Fathers of the Republic.

If we need a short name for the enemy (and we do need one) I nominate the term introduced by Francis Fukuyama: Islamofascism. It connotes the toxic combination of a malignant narcissistic fantasy retrojected onto the founders of Islam, combined with modern Western fascist techniques of agitation, propaganda, and thuggishness. And of course, Western weapons. The worst of the Middle East in unholy matrimony with the worst of the West. It is a bad name for a bad thing.

Nobody should like it as a name for the enemy. That's the point.

Why are Palestinians still Refugees?

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Natan Sharansky opines in How the UN Perpetuates the 'Refugee Problem' that the Palestinian Authority, and then Fatah and Hamas have actually prevented the Palestinians in Gaza from moving into the settlements from which the Israeli government forcibly evicted its own Israeli citizens as part of a peace process. This is being done because the Palestinian leadership views the suffering of the "refugees" as essential to their broader political struggle to eliminate Israel. He quotes both Palestinian and European diplomats in support of this thesis.

It would be nice to see a map or a satellite mosaic that could confirm or disconfirm whether Palestinians have occupied former Israeli settlements, but best map I could find was in this BBC article. The only conclusion I can draw is that it's been 60 years: its time to build out the camps into cities, with real functioning infrastructure, and stop granting refugee status to their second and third generation inhabitants. They aren't refugees from anywhere anymore. They are living on the land of their birth, and their parents' births. Rather than build up the land and its people, the Palestinian leadership insists on engaging in behavior that repeatedly bankrupts their economy, squandering the foreign aid they receive.

But Sharansky also alleged that the Palestinians engage in the "most shameful military tactic: pimping the suffering of their civilians as a weapon of [propaganda] war." That accusation is easily corroborated. Further in this post, Yaacov Lozowick notes that,

Sometime this afternoon we killed dozens of Palestinian civilians in a school. The Palestinians claim more than 40 dead civilians, the BBC says it was 30. The IDF says mortar shells were fired from within the school, and even names the two Hamas men doing the firing; both were killed and must be counted among the dead. (I continue to be amazed by the level of micro-intelligence the IDF is working with). These dead civilians are added to the many dozens, perhaps even a few hundred who have been killed so far. Which is horrifying, and terrible. I'm a father, my children now all responsible adults, but I can remember fondly when they were younger. I think I can imagine the terror of the Palestinian parents in Gaza, and I can feebly feel the pain of those losing children. So can any Israeli. Contrary to what the Guardianistas tell you, we're human beings, not monsters.

See also this article.

The point I'd like to extract is that two Hamas men were firing mortar rounds at Israeli troops from within the school while it was full of civilians! Don't people normally call off school in a war zone? What on earth were the civilians doing in the school during a shooting conflict? Or, consider the opposite question, if civilians were in the school, why on earth would Hamas gunmen draw fire onto the school by launching mortar rounds from it? Understand that one sets a mortar down on a hastily prepared position and then fires it - shooting a mortar is not an impulsive act, it is done with planning, execution and intention. Only one conclusion is possible - for whatever reason, the Hamas gunmen wanted Palestinian civilians to be killed by Israeli counter-battery fire. There is no way the choice of a school full of civilians as a firing site could have been accidental on their part. [Note added 1/9/08: More corroboration - see this.

And Pope John Paul II called Western secularism a "culture of death." I think that epithet applies much more strongly to what passes for culture in Gaza.

While we're at it, see this little video I found at Perpetua of Carthage.

Gaza and Proportion

Shrinkwrapped has written "Adolescence and Societies" and "Gaza and the Palestinian Hostile-Dependent Adolescent."

I think he's on to something, although I reserve judgement regarding his take on the meaning of Insh'allah. He also neglects the role that honor/shame culture plays into the violent refusal of Hamas and the Palestinians to "grow up," but that's because he's a psychiatrist, not a sociologist.

And what does the world do? The world subsidizes the genocidal ambitions and persistent violence of the Palestinians. The aid does not help build the Palestinian economy, it merely preserves the Palestinians in their state of adolescent hostile-dependency. And yet, aid to the Palestinians can be analyzed in more detail to make it seem a complicated business.

The most charitable interpretation one can put on the Palestinian situation is this: every time the Palestinians raise the level of violence against Israel, Israel limits access to its economy to the Palestinians. The Palestinian economy tanks, and the world steps in to rescue the Palestinians from starvation. That is, the world steps in to rescue the Palestinians from the consequences of their actions.

I could blame the Palestinian leadership, Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, claiming that these two parties oppress their people and perpetrate violence against Israel that their people do not condone. But that would be a lie. These two parties mislead and rip off their people, but their violence against Israel is wildly popular.

What is Israel to do? What would you do to me if I took up the habit of firing a few shotgun blasts into your house every night? If there were a functioning government over us, you would call the police. But suppose this is lawless country, and that you are on your own. I fire my shotgun a few more times into your house, while you are thinking about it. I blow the arm off one of your kids. You try to reason with me. I shoot your kid in the leg. You try some more. I shoot your kid again. And so on.

At some point, you stop trying to reason with me, you stop apologizing for whatever you did that gave me cause for anger, and you try operant conditioning. You shoot back. Then you wait. If I shoot again, you shoot again. If I stop, you stop. You keep this up for as long as it takes, cycle after cycle, for me to figure out that this is a dance, and I am playing the tune. If I play war, you dance war. If I play peace, you dance peace. It's up to me. If I am not willfully stupid, I will eventually stop shooting into your house. Especially if you have a cannon that can blow my house to bits, should I make you angry enough.

Yes, I know. The actions of the Israelis look like disproportionate use of force compared to the military weakness of the Gazans. Apparently they have decided to give the Palestinians the propaganda victory in exchange for achieving a limited military objective, namely degrading the ability of Hamas to shoot rockets into Israel. To all the world it looks like Israel lost the conflict in Lebanon against Hizbollah, but no rockets have been launched into Israel from that area since then. If the current operation achieves a similar result, Israel will live with it. As they have said.

On the other hand, there was no worldwide appeal for a cease-fire while Hamas was shooting rockets into Israel. The images are gruesome, but given the anger they must feel, the Israelis must think their actions are restrained. Or are only Muslims allowed to get angry? The Palestinians hit Israel with all they've got, and the Israelis hold back. When they finally react, they do it with their hands mostly tied behind their backs, compared to what they could do if they really let their anger have free rein. The world does not complain about the Palestinians's violence, but it never fails to complain about the inevitable Israeli reaction.

And what would a "proportionate" use of force look like? Would the world stand by while Israel sends exactly the same number of rockets into Gaza every time Gaza launches rockets into Israel? Would the world stand by while Israel drops a bomb into a Palestinian market every time a Palestinian suicide bomber strikes in Israel?

Would you want to live like that? Or would you prefer to strike your enemy hard enough to get them to rethink this whole rocket business in the first place? And just how hard is hard enough, when your enemy seems impervious to learning from the previous six decades of experience?

Perhaps Israel should negotiate with Hamas. What would a "proportionate" opening position look like? Hamas has dedicated itself to genocide against Israel, which it calls the "Zionist Entity." Should Israel dedicate itself to a proportionate position with respect to the Gaza Strip?

Instead of calling for the Israelis to be proportionate, maybe the world should call for the Palestinians to grow up and build their Palestinian state if that's what they really want. They have already had more foreign aid per capita than it took to reconstruct Europe after World War II. And no small part of that, I might add, has come from the United States.

Yes, I've Thought About It

I've been blogging recently about the problems associated with reducing the US nuclear weapons arsenal deliberately or by neglect. Am I for real, or am I just one of those people who deny the horror of what they contemplate by "psychic numbing" as Robert Jay Lifton believed? Am I one of those dehumanizing and dehumanized beasts that Bob Dylan wrote of in Masters of War?

Master Of War - Pearl Jam - Nuclear Remix - WalKnDude

I do not dare resolve that question for myself. That would be immoral. The Apostle Paul wasn't kidding when he said in his letter to the Phillipians (2:12), "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." Not for me. And not for you either, though you may not be aware of it.

But I do what I do because I believe all humanity needs it to be done. And yes, I believe the special status of the United States (despite its imperfections) as the last, best hope for the spread of liberal democracy requires me to do what I can to keep it strong. Liberal democracy (government chosen by the people it governs, and limited in its power over the people it governs) may not make a heaven on earth, but all the other systems of government have made hells.

See also: Obscenity and Peace, in which the obscenity referred to is war itself.

Moral Hazards on the Path to Zero

Dianne Feinstein, like most people in the world, probably thinks US nuclear weapons are targeted at somebody's cities. This is not true — yet. I say not yet, because targeting cities is one of the moral hazards on the path to zero nuclear weapons. The current US policy (and probably the Russian policy as well) is counter-force targeting. Counter-force means targeting the adversary's nuclear and conventional military forces and assets. We can afford to do this, because we believe we have enough assets to survive a first strike and still deliver an effective counter-strike.

But at some point, as the US destroys its nuclear weapons, there may not be enough to target an adversary's forces. So, in case hostilities break out, we will have to target (hold at risk) something else the adversary values. This is called counter-value targeting. Counter-value targeting is aimed at economic and symbolic centers, which are usually co-located with population centers. Hence, counter-value targeting is effectively a euphemism for threatening to launch nuclear weapons at cities.

Depending on how the geo-political climate evolves as we proceed along the path to zero nuclear weapons, we may need to switch from counter-force to counter-value targeting. The question for the American public is whether this switch is compatible with their moral values, or whether it might be better under some circumstances to pause on the path to zero until geo-politics makes it safe enough to proceed without switching to counter-value targeting.

Besides our targeting policy, the other moral hazard on the path to zero is strategic stability. As our nuclear forces decline, do we disperse them so that a single strike cannot destroy them all? Or do we consolidate them so that they can be more easily guarded against theft and diversion by terrorists? If we consolidate, then we may have to "launch on warning," because if we wait for confirmation that nuclear weapons are indeed striking us, we will have nothing left with which to strike back. If we disperse, then we will need to have the will to spend resources on security measures - "guns, guards, and gates," etc.

We do not need to "commit to a nuclear free world," as Dianne Feinstein demands. By treaty, we have already done so. We need to have a sober consideration of how we might get to that world. It will not be as easy or as safe as many people assume.

See also: Folding the Nuclear Umbrella and Pitfalls on the Path to Zero

Folding the Nuclear Umbrella

Senator Dianne Feinstein has written an opinion piece entitled"Let's Commit to a Nuclear-Free World," in this weekend's Wall Street Journal. In it she boasts of having blocked the Modern Pit Facility, Nuclear Test Readiness, and the Reliable Replacement Warhead. All three initiatives were part of folding the US Nuclear Umbrella in an orderly manner, rather than letting it collapse. I'll address these issues in the order Ms. Feinstein did.

The Modern Pit Facility was envisioned to re-manufacture "pits," which I assume is what Senator Feinstein meant by her use of the word "triggers." While it is true that we can re-use pits from dismantled nuclear warheads, we would need to re-manufacture those pits in order to build in certain "inherent" safety and security (anti-theft) features that the old pits don't have (because they were designed so long ago). Moreover, if we cannot re-manufacture pits, then we need to keep a lot of old pits around in case one or more of our adversaries decides to "sprint" to nuclear parity or superiority while we are trying to reduce our stockpile. The ability to re-manufacture would have enabled us to destroy many more of the old pits without fear that we would be leaving ourselves vulnerable to our adversaries. To state it as bluntly as I can, the Modern Pit Facility would have let us reduce our stockpile far below what we could risk without it. Failure to develop some kind of facility like it may set a limit on how low our stockpile can safely go.

Nuclear Test Readiness is part science and engineering, and part politics. The science and engineering is obvious: nuclear testing is the difference between confidence and certainty that our nuclear stockpile remains operational. The politics is that maintaining readiness makes it less attractive for an adversary to test so that they can watch us flounder for a few years trying to get ready to respond. That would erode confidence in the US stockpile and resolve, and might make some countries wonder whether they can really count on our nuclear umbrella, or whether they should build there own. Failure to maintain a reasonable readiness may thus contribute to nuclear proliferation - among our allies.

The Reliable Replacement Warhead is proof that nuclear weapons scientists don't know anything about marketing. What was really happening is that parts of the warheads in the current (so-called "Enduring") stockpile need replacement or fixing every so many years. We can maintain parts of the old Cold War weapons complex to service those parts, or we can redesign the parts to be manufactured and maintained by a smaller, complex that is cheaper, more secure, and more environmentally responsible to operate. Again, the idea behind the RRW and the MPF was to substitute a smaller, more responsive manufacturing complex for a bloated stockpile that included a lot of nuclear spare parts. Failure to move forward with these projects may again set a minimum number of nuclear warheads and spare nuclear components below which we cannot safely go - a roadblock on the path to zero.

That is to say, we need to be able to go from zero nuclear weapons to a lot very quickly. Otherwise, if we get to zero, our adversaries will use the opportunity to take advantage of us in ways that are both unpredictable and horrible to contemplate.

We may indeed get to zero nuclear weapons some day. But let us not do it on a path that leaves us and our allies naked before our enemies. Let us fold the US nuclear umbrella in such a way that it can be re-deployed quickly should international conditions warrant.

See also: Pitfalls on the Path to Zero

Pitfalls on the Path to Zero

You can take this as an open letter to President-Elect Obama's senior Science Advisor, John P. Holdren, currently a professor of environmental science at Harvard University, and a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). I want to explore an idea he discussed in his Presidential address to the AAAS given last year: the idea that within two decades we can eliminate all nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. He said:

S&T [Science and Technology] can contribute to achieving such progress in several ways: through technical advances that make verifying weapon-reduction agreements easier (and thus make agreeing to them easier); through other technical advances that make nuclear energy technology less likely to be used for nuclear weaponry and/or more likely to be detected if this happens; through applications of science and engineering to the task of reducing the dangers of accidental, erroneous, or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons, as well to the task of obviating any need for nuclear explosive testing of weapons, for as long as these still exist; and through S&T-based integrated assessments clarifying dangers and pitfalls on the path to zero and how to avoid them.

Think of this as a systems analyst offering a 10,000 mile high overview of what Holdren referred to as "those dangers and pitfalls on the path to zero."

I have seven observations to make from that perspective:

(1) In a world in which nobody "officially" has any nuclear weapons, the value of clandestinely having just a few becomes practically infinite. The incentive to cheat becomes irresistible strategic common sense for countries that feel threatened by their neighbors, but are unable to deter them by non-nuclear means. And this cheating could come either through indigenous S&T, or through prices to the likes of an A. Q. Khan network inflating almost without limit.

(2) As the nuclear umbrella of the United States folds up, the thirty-odd countries that are currently under it will take stock of their situation. Some of them will "go nuclear." Thus, although the total number of nuclear weapons may decline, they may be possessed by more and more countries. That is to say, the decline of the arsenals of the great powers may actually increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.

(3) As Holdren notes, proliferation to more countries will mean that more countries have nuclear weapons without having experience in controlling and securing them. Let me amplify this point. Our experience helping Russia with nuclear materials protection, control and accounting (MPC&A) indicates that such activities are strongly influenced by geography and culture. As nuclear weapons are developed by more and more countries in response to the decline of the great power arsenals, there will be a wider variety of MPC&A practices for terrorist organizations (of which al-Qaeda is only one) to probe for weaknesses. The chances for terrorists to obtain nuclear weapons may actually increase as we proceed along the path to zero.

(4) In a world where the great power nuclear arsenals decline below some trigger point, secondary powers may decide to sprint to parity or superiority. (Think of Pakistan realizing that it could surpass the US and Russian arsenals by ramping up production for a year or two.) This could lead to very unpleasant consequences, perhaps the best of which is a new multi-polar nuclear arms race.

(5) Suppose that all the forgoing obstacles are overcome, by almost magical means of surveillance and verification that work even with un-cooperative regimes, by preternaturally skillful diplomacy, etc. The result will be a world made safe for unlimited global warfare. Multi-state hot shooting wars, like World War I and World War II, could again be risked without fear of total annihilation. World War II resulted in the deaths of some 50 million people. Indeed, until the invention and shocking use of nuclear weapons, the number of people killed in wars had been rising exponentially. Eliminating nuclear weapons might cause a reversion to the status quo ante - more people might end up being killed in wars in a nuclear weapon free world than in a world with one or two large, stabilizing arsenals.

(6) From the forgoing it should be obvious that eliminating nuclear weapons will not make peace. It works the other way around. Making peace will eliminate nuclear weapons. (How long do you think North Korea's nuclear arsenal would last if there were genuine peace on the Korean peninsula, for example? I mean real peace, like what happened between the East and West Germany.) But eliminating nuclear weapons is conceptually easy. In essence it requires the ability to count. Making peace, by contrast, is hard. It can't be quantified precisely. It can't be measured. So far, it has even eluded precise definition by sociologists, the very people you'd think would be the experts on peace. Yet, if we do not make peace on earth as we eliminate nuclear weapons, we will simply create a less stable and more dangerous world than the one we have now.

(7) Finally, the whole issue of nuclear weapons may be "overtaken by events." What makes anyone think that the atomic nucleus contains the last word on explosive energy release? Of course, the theoretical physics for such a thing hasn't been discovered yet, but the physical limit on explosive energy release is out there for all astrophysicists to see. It's the Big Bang that began our universe. Now it is true that any explosive event more intense than a nuclear weapon will release the same forms of energy (x-rays, gamma rays, etc.) and it can therefore be treated as a nuclear weapon. That's true, technically. But quantity has a quality all its own. Nuclear weapons are about a million times more powerful by weight than chemical explosives. Can we really deal with another factor of a million? Or a million million? World culture is now such that S&T marches on. Genies will keep popping out of bottles they can't be put back in. Peacemaking is not an option. It is a necessity.

All of this is to say that the path to zero will be perilous, and must be tread with great care. Although the necessity of peacemaking tells us that we must start down that path, we do not yet know how to go very far along it, much less how we will finish.

May God help us.